Post-Awakening Challenges: The Lost Gray World of Apathy

First off, this blog post is specifically written for people
after a spiritual awakening. This post isn't for people who are feeling disconnected from their hearts or for those who are feeling generally frustrated at
knowing that this world is screwed up, but not knowing how to change it. This
also isn't addressing depression nor is it meant to speak to chemical
imbalances or a variety of legitimate mental health issues. If you have a mental
health issue or are concerned that you might have one, then I strongly recommend
connecting with a therapist.

This blog post is speaking to people who have awakened and touched
deep divine connection.

After a spiritual awakening and/or other significant
spiritual shifts, the things that you once thought were important no longer
are. New interests may not be readily apparent, and so the individual finds
him/herself in this gray space. Nothing is really interesting anymore, and a sense of indifference can take over a person. It’s not actually a bad place,
but few people are ready to handle this kind of neutrality and sit with it.
Instead, it kind of shocks the remaining ego. I say "remaining ego" because it’s rare
for the entirety of someone’s ego to be gone after one spiritual shift. Dissolving
the ego is much more like peeling an onion, and few egos like being in a place
of apathy and watching their interests dissolve away. Because of this, people
can react negatively to this experience, and that can lead to all kinds of
strange states and experiences right when a deeper dissolution into spiritual freedom is possible.

Connected in Oneness But Indifferent

There are two over-arching kinds of spiritual apathy. One
involves deep connection, and the other involves disconnection. Primarily, I’m
focusing on the sense of connection. However, the sense of disconnection kind
of requires some level of knowing around what connection is. Without it, the
person is too unconscious to know that they’re disconnected.

For the apathy that arises when we are connected, a lot of
that has to do with no longer being attached to desires and ideas that only
supported the ego self. So a man who loved sports suddenly loses all interest
in it after awakening. For this individual, sports were a means of establishing
and maintaining his ego identity, which involved things like winning,
masculinity, male community, and other things. But the insecure ego that needed
to prove he was a man, a success, and have certain types of friends is gone in the space of oneness. There is just this spacious being. That space doesn’t need
those things, and without the need, the interests dissolve.

However, as I said before, it’s rare that the whole of the
ego goes. If was entirely gone, he would not be bothered at all by the loss of his desires. Instead, most of the ego is generally still around, and it causes this man to wonder what happened to his interests in
football. He may wonder why he doesn’t want to go out drinking with his
buddies, and his friends are probably calling and asking the same. For those
brand new to the space of oneness, it’s strange. The more he drifts back to ego identification, the more he'll become troubled by these lost desires.

Returning to Ego Identification

It’s very common for people to seesaw into ego
identification and out of it. In one of the simplest and most profound
spiritual practices, we practice witnessing our thoughts, feelings, and
sensations. When we are the witness, we have disidentified with the ego. When
we get caught in our thinking and feeling, then we have seesawed back into
identification with the ego.

Despite the power of awakening, this seesawing is very
common. It also tends to be more extreme after awakening now that an inner
energy is driving the dissolution of the ego—aka the spiritual awakening process. Sometimes people feel kind of manic as they go from deep spaces of peace
to deep anxiety, frustration, or apathy (the types of emotions that arise
depend on the individual ego). This roller coaster gets worse—as it usually
does—the more someone re-identifies with the ego and tries to hold onto their
old sense of identity. It’s like holding onto two freight trains travelling in
opposite directions. At the very least, it’s deeply draining.

Indifference Arising from Energy Depletion

Another form of apathy that can arise is simply from energy
depletion. It’s a lot of work at times to dissolve deeply held issues and ego
attachments. With a true spiritual awakening, a lot of stuff gets pushed up all
at once. It requires a lot of energy to process what is being understood on the
mind, heart, body, and energy levels all at once. With all your energy
dedicated to this transformation, you may find that you have no energy left to
be interested in much of anything else.

However, as some of you probably figured out, this isn’t a
true apathy. There is an interest. In this example, the person is interested in
their awakening, and their attention is placed there. The issue is more around
if the person thinks they should have energy to be interested in other things
at this time. To be fair, there are a lot of demands people can have in their
lives, and it can be jarring to no longer be interested in working,
child-rearing, and other things. This is not a loss of interest in any sort of
cynical way or avoidance. It simply is like when a caterpillar is in a
chrysalis; she’s not doing much else.

If this is where you are, here are some strategies to help
you consciously deal with work, child-rearing, and other practical concerns.

Dealing with Indecision

In the form of spiritual apathy regarding indecisive, your old self wants one
thing, and your new sense of self wants a different thing. This happens a lot. The
old impulse to drink wine with your girlfriends comes up, and another impulse
to go to a new yoga community gathering comes up. They both have an attraction
to you, but it makes it hard to decide. The old ego still wants to do what it
always has. The new desire to investigate a yoga gathering isn’t that strong
yet, and it probably is running up against the fear of the unknown. So the
person feels very indecisive.

In general, the fear of the unknown creates a lot of
problems for people. New interests do arise after major spiritual shifts. They
usually are around exploring spirituality more fully, and that often means stepping
outside of your comfort zone to try new things. That space outside your comfort
zone is the unknown, and most human beings have a lot of fear of that.

Additionally, there are a lot of inner spaces that a person
must investigate, and the fear of the unknown can make people want to avoid
them as they are afraid of what they may find. Very often fear and avoidance fuel
this sense of indecision. There may actually not be any indecision; there may
only be fear. But the longer someone avoids things, the more things slow down
to a halt. This can make the person feel particularly indifferent and lost in a
gray haze of feelings.

Disconnected and Apathetic

After awakening, it’s hard to fully disconnect, but it is
possible because anything is possible in a universe of infinite possibilities.

When someone disconnects from the awakened energy that is moving them, they feel truly lost. A part of
them will probably remember what it is like to know and feel the truth, but
they’ll try to be content with their old illusions anyway. They may reside even more in spiritual apathy because some of their desires got washed away in the
initial awakening flood of energy. But they didn’t do the surrendering that was
necessary to wash the ego more fully. So the vibrancy of life in the present moment
is missed. Life just seems gray and meaningless. They’re stuck.

The way out is to figure out where you resisted the inner
changes and possibly avoided some external changes that were needed. If your ego is
confusing you too much, get outside support in figuring this out. However, you
are going to need to be ready to hear the truth. If you have disconnected
yourself from the flow after awakening, you probably put forth a tremendous
amount of resistance to do so. That probably felt horrible, and the way to
jump start this whole thing again is back through that resistance, which will
probably feel terrible as well.

In general, the problem with apathy is that it’s not really
that bad. A dark night of the soul will drive someone to change because they
don’t want to stay there. But living in a space of apathy and probably a
certain degree of numbness is manageable. More than a few people even manage to
convince themselves that they are happy again with their old desires.

The Illusion of Disconnection

Ultimately, we are never disconnected from oneness, but we
can focus our energy on illusions. The more we focus on separation, the more disconnected we'll feel even if we ultimately are never disconnected.

Early on someone’s spiritual path, they are generally still
entranced by the many illusions of their ego. They’re entranced by romance,
body sensations, adventures, emotions, ideas, and all kind of things. They are
in a trance living in an ego fantasy. A true awakening shakes people out of this trance for a
short-term, but depending on the person’s initial experiences, they may get
entranced with something new.

A peaceful, blissful spiritual experience after awakening is
one way people get entranced again. Their ego thinks they can feel this way all
the time, and it decides that anything else is boring, not-good-enough, not-spiritual, or something else. So the ego may become apathetic
towards deeper states of peace and neutrality that come up because they are not this blissful feeling. In
this instance, apathy is a sign of ego rejection. It has decided that it knows
what a spiritual experience should feel like, and it just wants that one type
of experience again and again and again.

But this is not possible. Wanting only one type of
spiritual experience is a form of rejection. It is rejecting the infinite
number of other experiences we can have as well as holding onto the idea of an
experience that is now in the past.

Going towards Truth and Losing More Interests

In the short-term, people may find more spiritual interests as an apathy phase ends. These new interests can go on for awhile. They may build spiritual
communities around themselves and work with spiritual teachers. They may learn how to do self-inquiry and a host of useful spiritual tools. A lot of new
interests that feel truer to them may spring up for a time, and this is useful
for a certain phase of ego dissolution.

But the further you go, the less you have interests in anything, including any kind of overt spirituality. Why? Because of all of life is spiritual. There
is not one single atom in this universe that is not part of oneness. You can’t
go anywhere without being enmeshed with this truth and with spirituality. As
someone lets go of deeper ego layers, they more fully realize this. In such a
spiritual realization, more ego interests—including those spiritual
interests—drop away.

At Peace in Neutrality

The truest form of love is a kind of all-encompassing
neutrality. Everything is embraced, and the person is at peace with life as it
is. But unlike the blandness of apathy, peaceful neutrality is alive. It is
vibrant. It is.

This space has always been here, but our ego fixation on
having life be a certain way got in the way. The ego spends so much time
unconsciously judging everything that it never really sees and experiences the
present moment. In the deeper states of spiritual realization, we do see and
experience the present moment. We are at peace with it, and the sense of ego
apathy that often arises in the beginning of dissolving the ego after awakening
is melted away into peace and inner stillness.

Comments

I am feeling this today. Especially the split between everything being complete and perfect, beautiful just as it is, and that somehow being here implies that I am supposed to add to it somehow, but I don't have anything to add- it's already perfect!

My partner thought that I had run out of ideas and was uninspired, but the opposite is the case. I have all of them and am full of inspiration. Just no desire to act, and conflicting stressful thoughts about how my previous (to awakening) commitments to act seem futile and silly at best, not to mention simply unnecessary.

I'm also presently dealing with weird circumstances with people in my family accidentally injuring and hurting me in very strange and unexpected ways. I have a session booked with a cranial sacral therapist I adore this week coming up. I feel like this is going to change my life. And I am a bit scared and also ready.

Thanks for this article. It was exactly what I needed to read tonight.

I have been a formidable suppressor until recently, and I almost (and sometimes do) laugh when I realise that the beautiful unfolding of my consciousness was so thoroughly denied by me that I actually saw doctors about the "symptoms" that I now know were just about me trying to stop a firehose with plastic wrap. ;)

I found more conceptual congruence with films like The Matrix and Inception when experiencing "glitches" in the unstable platform. I am now beginning to allow that energy that was firing off as blow-outs in a hose, randomly and causing exhaustion. I'm still physically tired, but I feel better in waves, shifts.

It is surprising to me how much I am returning to childhood understandings, like I went on a long, strange vacation in a foreign land, and now I'm just re-acquainting myself with my home. It's so nice to be back. :)

All that to say that, though I've been visited by all sorts of helpers along the way, I behaved as though I were alone, and so, now I recognise this and see, so it is changing, and your blog, Jim, is a delight and encouragement for me while I am in the process of renewing. Thank you. :)

If you haven't read this post already, you'd probably like it: http://www.spiritualawakeningprocess.com/2011/08/riding-energy-rollercoaster-surviving.html

These shifts definitely come in waves, and they demand everything of us. And yes, all the misunderstandings and poor reasoning of adulthood get stripped away, taking us back to childhood. It's about building a new foundation built on Truth and not lies. It's about marrying child-like curiosity with spiritual wisdom so that we can become spiritual adults who live, play, and enjoy this world.

It's an honor to be one of your helpers from time to time with my words.

my healing process hit a road block for me about a year ago... I could feel all these things from childhood bothering me deep down but didn't feel like I could talk to anyone about all the abuses & wounds of my earlier years so I ended up finding a therapist and worked through it all with her. A year later I feel like an entirely new person with so many less barriers (even in my everyday working life). It's amazing how these deep inner wounds from years ago affect your everyday interactions with people. I feel so lucky to have come across such an amazing therapist and sites like these to help me along my journey. Thank you so much for sharing your valuable insights.

Going through this right now. I feel lost and unfocused. I know I’m a higher being and limistless, but I still letting my old fears and attachments limit me. My ego seems to still be fighting to hold on. I’m glad to stumble upon this blog to help me process everything that I’m going through. I’m not entirely sure on where to go from here.

Recently i feel i have lost of interest in anything i used to and unknowingly what is my new interest. I thought i'm still in the darkness and still undergoing awakening. I'm not sure what comes next. I think i'm too peace to worry. Just that i wish i could get to know about my life purpose. So i can re-start my life and to serve the higher purpose. This article does helped me. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. I recommend doing some journaling on the desire for a higher purpose. What is a higher purpose? How is it different than a regular purpose? Why do you need it?

Once you get answers to those questions, then question your answers. In this way, you can peel the desire like an onion to get to the core issue that is disrupting your ability to be at peace in the Now.